He twisted, nearly caught hold of the weir as it sped over and past, but treacherous as ever, it evaded him. The last sight Tokela had before the murk covered him was Anahli’s long, ebon braids trailing behind her… and behind the weir, as it went careening downRiver.
MADOC WENT skidding over the precipice, legs dangling; at the last moment he snatched at the tree roots clinging there. They stretched, some breaking, bark shredding through his palms. Nevertheless, he clutched tight, body jerking to a halt, arm and shoulder tendons stabbing; letting out a yelp, Madoc hung on. It was no use. The roots tore from Earth and tree. Madoc dropped like a stone, heard Laocha and Kuli scream, heard Akumeh give a shout just before Madoc hit the water.
A rush of thick, noisy cool enveloped him, cradled him—but not enough. One shoulder smashed into a boulder; one foot dove into a crevice, held there as he was tossed sideways. The crack of bone and tendon followed, with a rip-snap of pain. Madoc’s own shriek was swallowed by River’s current.
Something brushed against him, and he recoiled, by instinct striking out with both hands. His fingers tangled in something both solid and soft a scant heartbeat before his eyes flew open.
Tokela, travelling in the current like an up-rent and waterlogged thatch of reeds.
A huge shadow falling from above, a whump and torrent nearly atop them. Hard fingers clutched in Madoc’s ahlóssa braid, pulling him to the surface. Madoc clutched his own hands into fists, slipped on wet skin then found purchase on Tokela’s knife harness. He didn’t let go, even when Akumeh hauled him into light and Wind, even after he realised Akumeh also held Tokela, dragging them both to the opposite bank.
Akumeh shoved Madoc up on the bank. Tokela seemed a harder burden, somehow. When Akumeh finally managed to toss Tokela onto the rocky bank, it was with a thick, lifeless thud.
After, Tokela just lay there, still and pale, arms flung limp over his head. A big gash was laid open across his temple; it bled, freely.
A huge wave of relief nearly blackened Madoc’s sight. Akumeh, too, gave a strangled cry of relief and fell to his knees. He bent over and started shoving—hard—against Tokela’s breast.
“Akumeh!” It was a cry from overhead: Laocha.
“Madoc, where’s Anahli?” This from Kuli, leaning perilously over the edge above. “Anahli!”
Their shrieks echoed, almost swallowed by the churning water.
Anahli.
Akumeh didn’t stop shoving at Tokela. Madoc tried to move, act. Pain flared through his leg and felled him on the spot. Tokela choked, convulsed, curled sideways. River water spewed, commingling with blood on the stones.
“Tokela!” Madoc grabbed for him, missed.
Either his voice or Akumeh curling bodily behind Tokela and giving one more jerk and heave was the deciding point. Tokela pitched upwards with a muffled shriek, spewing and choking, water pouring from his mouth and nose and down his chest. Akumeh held him through the worst of it, and Madoc couldn’t even resent him, much as he wanted to.
Wild-eyed, Tokela fought him, and when he could breathe enough to speak, his first sound was, “Ah… nahli?” It choked, barely audible over the fall.
“It’s done, Otter.” Akumeh held on. “It’s done.”
“Where… where is”—Tokela kept coughing, spewing water—“Anahli? Where is she?” It didn’t seem possible, but he was gaining free of Akumeh’s hold, squirming and sliding from the firm grasp like a greased Dancer. “We have to find her… River has her!”
To hear it spoken aloud shoved Madoc back against the ground like a cart-weight of stone, a shiver and stutter of sudden fear loosed and realised.
Tokela had clambered up, staggering, evading Akumeh’s every effort to hold him. “We have to find her. We have to!”
Akumeh didn’t stop trying, either. “It’s over, Otter. It’s over. Over.” Every repetition piled more weight onto Madoc. He was immobile from it, pressing into Earth and helpless.
“Otter… Hear me. Otter… Tokela!” Akumeh finally grabbed one arm, yanked Tokela back around. “It’s done, do you hear me?”
“Not over. It can’t be. We have to go after her, have to find her, have to…” Tokela was past listening, disoriented. Maddened, with blood and mud and ebon-copper hair runnelling into his face and eyes—and those eyes were white-wild, with shadows like clouds, and sparks like ice falling from wintering Sky.
Madoc tried to lurch upwards again; again, he fell back with a pained shout.
The two other ahlóssa kept keening on the clifftop, clutching to each other.
“Listen!” Akumeh grabbed Tokela’s other arm, yanked him close, shook him. “She’s gone.”
A soft negation whimpered from some deep place in Madoc’s chest, but neither of the oških paid any heed.
“You were nearly gone, and she’s—”
Tokela turned on Akumeh, shrieked, “We have to find her!” It cut even River’s sound into tiny shards, echoed upwards and into the trees and hung there, vibrating.
Then he wrung from Akumeh’s grip, ran the few steps to River and dove, cutting coppery water like a bone blade, disappearing in the froth.
“Tokela!” Madoc shouted after, and this time he managed to gain his feet—or foot, the other dragged at his side, scraping pain up every nerve he had.
“You can’t do anything, not now!” Akumeh growled, shoving him back down. Madoc couldn’t help the whimper as his leg went a-Fire with pain. Akumeh shot him a remorseful glance, then shouted upwards. “Go, ahlóssa! Go for Sarinak! Bring help!”
Kuli was no longer there. But Laocha, obedient, whirled and disappeared.
Akumeh took a few running steps, dove after Tokela. Madoc watched, frightened and furious and frustrated, chest heaving like a bellows.
You can’t do anything!
Madoc couldn’t, but Akumeh would, and Tokela, and Laocha… she would bring help—where was Kuli?—but she had to. These kind of things couldn’t truly happen; they were tales to frighten ahlóssa, something only heard about, things that only happened to other people. It didn’t happen to your cousins, it didn’t happen to people you knew. Not like this. It couldn’t.
As if a herdbeast had suddenly kicked him in the gut, Madoc fell back. Lay there, useless and gasping as landed fishKin, memory and reason flooding in where Wind had gone absent.
Couldn’t? Ai, but it could. It had.
Tokela’s sire and dam, after all, had drowned.
Madoc let out a gasp. Wind filled his lungs, an intoxication to match Tokela’s display of dizzying strength. All of it made abrupt sense—denial, insistence—and for the first time Madoc became aware of what this one, inconceivable happening would mean to Tokela.
Or at least what Madoc thought it should mean. They’d never spoken of it. They’d shared many things, but not this. Never this. Had Tokela seen his parents drown? Or had it been like with Anahli?—carried away, wrack upon the current, a broken doll tossed upon River…
That hit hardest, racked Madoc over and choked him, making him want to puke until his vision turned to blood-coloured soot. Anahli. Anahli, and Tokela, and…
You can’t do anything!
Madoc snarled, then started to crawl towards River.
He didn’t need both legs to swim.
I have her.
She means Anahli and he knows it; River is speaking to him… speaking to him in thisnow with more than feelings and images crowding in his brain begging interpretation.
It is language. It is talk.
Tokela swims, breasting sleek and fast as any namesake of otterKin. His arms already feel torn from their sockets, his head ringing in the wake of the weir’s passage, reason seeping from him as steadily as the blood he leaves behind, a mere darker cloud in already-copper waters. He growls denial of it, breath hitching in the back of his throat.
She cannot take this, too. Does She not already have everything? Has She not already taken everything from him? He is helpless again, helpless before Her as the ahlóssa who found
his parents on Her bank…
Not helpless, my own. If you want her, then you must come to Me.
Tokela dives deep even before his thoughts have a chance to surface, following a will that is his, but not.
She has Anahli.
And I will have you. Listen, my own. Listen, and do not shut me away, and I shall tell you all the secrets you have shunned.
He glides through coppery half light as easily if he breathes water instead of air, hears the hollow echoes of his movement, feels crimson-black Power thrumming with his pulse, behind his eyes. Opens those eyes.
Stills.
Listens.
Sees, never witnessed but always known, intimate and deep: how hair floats, carried in the drift; how bodies float, loose-limbed and passive, submitting to the caress of current as if in slumber.
He panics.
In a furious blur of copper froth and weighted, too-slow limbs, Tokela descends upon the weir where it has tangled in bottom sludge and roots. With a heavy-thick slash of knife against entangling rope he frees the unconscious oških and, severed ropes still splaying, bursts upwards to light and life and Sky. Staggers from River’s clutch with dead weight in his arms, stumbles as gravel and stones sink him, trip him, fell him to his knees. Falls forwards, his burden flinging out limp and empty beneath him.
Breast heaving in tight-clenched, truncated sobs, eyes dark with a skim of blood and black, he splays trembling fingers over the slack, pale face and down, to query ribs that do not answer to draw breath, that do not quiver, even slight, with the heart’s drumtalk.
So cold. So still. So… fragile.
Tokela shakes her. Says her name, first a whisper then a sharp reprimand.
Yet Anahli’s head lolls, braids like sodden snakes, joining the matted River-wrack clinging to indigo Marked cheeks and wilted neck.
Don’t take her… please, please don’t… You can’t do this, don’t make me live through this again!
In death, lips are the hue of his own gaze, indigo-and-ebon. Tokela knows, because he saw it—saw his parents dead upon Her—and memory seeks him but he cannot bear it, cannot let it ever take him, ducks and dives beneath.
River holds him, curling at his feet, foaming up the shore to his thighs. She murmurs his name. Whispers Anahli’s.
“N’da!” It is a hoarse shriek. “You will not have her, you cannot have her! She isn’t yours—I am! Take me instead… me… me…” It wavers into a moan, a frenzied growl/whisper/keen against Anahli’s soft, immobile breast as he lies there in the foam and gravel, drenched to skin and steaming, a hum of ebony and indigo filling his burning eyes. Hands splay, plead, clutch…
Take me!
And She does.
A twist within: an answer, a surge to take him under. Curling. Expanding. The water in Anahli’s lungs—in his own lungs—sloshes heavy and stifling, and he writhes, whimpers beneath the sodden weight. Retches against it, somehow begins to heave up everything in him, in Anahli, in them. The blood-black skim behind his eyes swells into a crash of copper tide—rushing, pulling back to course through him again, and again, as sobs of denial become a rush of mutters not his own.
Language not his own. Other, filling up every space within, twisting and shrieking through his Spirit, changing, Shaping.
Because everything changes. An entire existence can change in the span of a heart’s beating.
Sudden droplets patter against the still and sunken chest: like Rain, like the last seep of life from game hung to bleed out. Each one has a sound as it impacts. Each one leaves a tiny smear of impossible hue—not crystalline tears, not carmine blood, but thin indigo, as if Tokela’s oških Marks are leeching beneath the scorch of his tears. Each one pools then runs over and down Anahli’s throat, indigo runnelling across sienna. Each one reverberates through Tokela: spilling from his nose and eyes; hitting acrid-thick against the back of his throat; filling his ears and heart to finally burst, the heat/relief/agony of a septic wound being lanced.
No longer himself but more in himself than he has ever been, bound to everything and nothing, drowning and tangled and sinking even faster, and he will not let this happen, will not bend to death just as he has become alive.
Alive.
The chill leather beneath his fingers gives a quiver. Surges, a wave against a shoreline. Chokes, then retches, as if echoing Tokela’s force. Convulses, curls, pukes water and bile and more water. Falls back, gasping in huge gouts.
Breathing…
“Otter?” A breath, choked into stillness, faint and nearly lost beneath River’s rush within Tokela’s ears and heart. “Squander and sc… Tokela?”
For a heartbeat Tokela didn’t see—couldn’t see—what was standing, shadowed, above him. Slowly his pupils narrowed from black skim to Sun’s light-Shapings. They limned a tall, sturdy oških, his half-shaven head with black twistlocks plastered sodden to one pectoral, catching in a knife harness. One arm extended, the fingers splayed as if in warding; legs spread as if he’d sprinted so far then halted half-stride.
Fear, raw, in his face.
Tokela blinked, then blinked again. Recognition set in.
Akumeh. And, behind him…
Madoc.
Sopping wet, sprawled half in the water’s roil and half onto the bank, braced on his arms. His tangled, sodden forelock could not curtain the alarm, wide-white, about his Earth-copper eyes.
He was staring at Tokela. At Anahli, lying still and pale and streaked with indigo. Then back again.
Kuli stumbled up, then, and said, “Anahli? Tokela?”
Tokela?
It echoes into the neverending, thrums with the drum of his heart, echoes in his skull but not upon his ears. No talk, only hoarse, waterlogged pants in the stillness, but nevertheless Anahli speaks:
Tohwakelifitčiluka. My heart Sees you, oathbrother.
And her eyes open, dark as drowning kelp, and River is there, reflecting a copper haze that gives way, curls back, parts before thick grey mists blown before Wind.
Eyes meet eyes to waken Spirit…
Yet none of that matters. What matters is the horror of what still stains her throat; what slides down her now-heaving ribcage, warm and thick; what drips from Tokela’s face even as he watches, to fall upon Anahli’s cheek like a tear. It smears upon the fingers Tokela puts to his face then extends before him with sick, detached curiosity. It smells like blood, somewhat; he can taste the hot melt upon his tongue. But it doesn’t look like blood.
It looks like indigo.
The keen spills from his throat. Voices have become a voice: his own, a strangled scream ripping into Forest’s sudden-odd silence.
It takes him, then, tumbles him into River and spins him into Her depths.
Tokela knelt… n’da, he half-lay, prostrate upon Anahli’s body. Like the mourners Madoc had seen upon their dead, swaying, denying what Fire would consume into ash for River… for they all went to Her in the end, didn’t they?
Anahli was so still. She’d left them, walked on, gone to River already without waiting for Fire or ash. Tokela was proof of that, quaking like a tree in Wind’s fury, shaking his head and making soft, broken sounds. Denial. Fury. The sounds of a heart cracked and split with grief. It tore into Madoc’s own breast, wrenched a sharp, springing sob in his throat and a hollow in his gut, deep and sharp and unstoppable.
Madoc had to turn away—he couldn’t bear it, couldn’t watch anymore—and only then did he see Akumeh standing on the bank, as stilled, as unwilling to intrude into a grief he didn’t thoroughly understand.
Tokela pushed upwards, shoving against Anahli’s chest as if he still would deny, still not believe. Akumeh shook his head, said, puzzled, “Otter?”
Madoc envied Akumeh; as for himself, he couldn’t speak if he’d had to.
“Anahli! Tokela!” A cry from Kuli, who’d sped down here as if he’d wings instead of feet, flying forwards as if to throw himself upon his sister’s body.
Akumeh grabbed Kuli up. Held him, too,
even when the ahlóssa growled, struggled, even bit to get free.
A strangling sound—choke and mewl and heave all at once—came from Tokela… n’da, from Anahli. Tokela shuddered. Anahli twitched, then convulsed, then turned sideways and heaved up more water than anyone should be able to hold and live.
Akumeh stepped closer, once again spoke—only this time it held more horror than pity. He staggered back as Tokela whipped around from Anahli’s body, snarling not unlike one of lionKin defending a kill. Madoc didn’t blame Akumeh. Tokela’s face was pale as Brother Moon, his eyes nigh black, lit only by faint and frantic glimmers of what must be darksight but seemed even… more, somehow. Blood streamed from a long gash upon his forehead, rivulets streaking his face; it had gathered in his eyes like tears, and a thin stream of it from his nose.
Only, Madoc realised with a jolt, it wasn’t. Blood. It ran thick like blood, pooled around Tokela’s eyes and nostrils and dripped, slow onto Anahli’s breast, but it wasn’t. Blood. Was it?
Tokela seemed to notice, then. His sudden cry sent Akumeh staggering back, and the second, more a keen, raked cold claws down Madoc’s spine, trying to pull him down.
Yet when Tokela’s third scream choked into silence and he fell, senseless, across Anahli’s coughing form—even as Akumeh turned to Madoc with active terror scrawled over his expression—the same terror did not take Madoc. Even though part of him wanted it to.
Instead he propped himself higher, half in and out of the water. Ordered, “Go! Bring my sire!”
Akumeh hesitated. Ai, Madoc was chieftain-son, but he was also the same ahlóssa Akumeh had dragged by his plait to this very fall.
“Go on!” Madoc snapped.
Akumeh’s response made cold measure of his apprehension. He loosed Kuli without a word, turned, and dove into the water. Not long after, he waded out the other side, disappearing into the trees at a mad run.
Tokela lay on the bank, as unmoving as Anahli had been not so long ago.
Kuli sprinted to his sister’s side, crying her name through tears as she tottered up to her elbows.
Blood Indigo Page 39